We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous in the relationship between poverty and reservation, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative assemblies in India that arises from national policies that cause reservations to be revised and the time lags with which the revised reservations are implemented due to the timing of state elections. Using data on sixteen major Indian states for the period 1960-1992, we find that increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes significantly reduces poverty while increasing the share of seats reserved for Scheduled Castes has no impact on poverty. Political reservation for Scheduled Tribes has a greater effect on rural poverty than urban poverty, and appears to benefit people near the poverty line as well as those far below it.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
4391.